Ethereum Foundation Slashes 54% Staff, Restructures Into Five Innovation Clusters

The Ethereum Foundation confirmed today it has cut 54% of its workforce and reorganized operations into five specialized clusters, signaling a major strategic pivot. This drastic restructuring, announced by Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi, aims to streamline decision-making and accelerate protocol development, though critics warn it may impact ecosystem coordination. The move consolidates the foundation's focus on scalability, security, and Layer-2 integration, with each cluster now operating with increased autonomy.

The Ethereum Foundation announced Monday that it has completed a major organisational restructure, reducing its headcount by 54 people — approximately 20% of the organisation — and reorganising its remaining staff into five domain clusters focused on protocol, access, user, community, and institutional work.

The restructure was framed by the foundation as the conclusion of a process begun under its Mandate and Treasury Management Policy, both introduced in 2025. The goal, per Monday's announcement, is an organisation "leaner and more focused" and better positioned to concentrate on work "that only EF can, and therefore must, do."

The five operational clusters each carry a distinct remit. The Protocol Layer cluster is tasked with shipping forks, defending the transaction pipeline against MEV, and advancing long-horizon research including post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy. The Access Layer cluster is focused on ensuring a credible, intermediary-free path exists for every action a user or agent might take on-chain — reading state, transacting, proving, and exiting. The User Layer cluster is meant to keep protocol and access decisions grounded in real user needs. The Community Layer handles how the EF presents itself externally, including relationships with allied movements in privacy, open-source software, and civil liberties. The Institutional Layer manages EF engagement with enterprises, governments, and academic institutions.

The restructure lands in a difficult period for the foundation. At least eight senior figures have left the organisation over the past five months, including both co-executive directors — Tomasz Stańczak earlier this year and Hsiao-Wei Wang last week, who announced her departure after a sabbatical. Board member Bastian Aue has taken on an interim leadership role. As Blockhead reported on June 19, the foundation has not announced a permanent replacement for either role.

ETH is currently trading around $1,673, down roughly 66% from its all-time high of $4,946 reached in August 2025. The token has struggled throughout 2026, weighed by macro headwinds, leadership uncertainty, and persistent ETF outflows. Glamsterdam, the protocol's most significant upgrade since the Merge — targeting a 3.3x gas limit expansion and approximately 10,000 transactions per second on L1 — has been pushed to Q3 2026 after missing an earlier H1 target.

Monday's post says the foundation will share more detail on how each cluster operates and how the broader ecosystem can engage with the new structure "in the coming weeks and months."